MSM Blinded by Own Biases — Biggest Initial Takeaway from Presidential Election — by Todd Macfarlane

The election of Donald Trump has come as an earth-shattering shock to the cock-sure Mainstream Media, in much the same way the Oregon Standoff Trial verdict came as such a shock — and for exactly the same reason(s):  because the Mainstream Media is so blinded by its own biases that it is in a perpetual state of denial with respect to actual reality — particularly as to the level of real discontent with the status quo in this country.

While it seems like this country has been holding its breath for at least the last month, waiting to see what the outcome of the presidential election would be, I will have to admit that for this entire year — and even longer — I have been saying that I wasn’t convinced that the whole political system isn’t so rigged, so fixed, so stacked, that anyone besides Hillary Clinton could possibly win the election.  Well, I was wrong.

Make no mistake, Donald Trump may not have been my first/top choice, but from start to finish Hillary Clinton was definitely my last choice. So I am pleasantly surprised, and happy to be wrong.

Although the outcome of the election may help dispel concerns that the whole system is completely rigged, it has done nothing to dispel any concerns that the deck is and has been completely stacked in terms of slanted media coverage and bias.  This became painfully obvious during the Obama  Administration and during his presidental election campaigns over the course of the past eight years.  But MSM bias has taken on an entirely new dimension in this year’s presidential election campaign.  And the fact that the Mainstream Media is now reeling to the extent it is, and continues to heavily slant coverage of the post-election aftermath, only serves to further substantiate this point. Just like the Oregon Standoff Trial, the MSM had been so over-confident in its narrative and foregone conclusions about the outcome, that it has not even been willing to recognize the prospect that anything else could possibily even happen.

“So what just happened”?  asked the New York Times.  If the Times is anything, it is the epitome of Mainstream Media.  By 3:00 a.m. “the morning after,” the NYTimes was openly admitting that it was in a full-fledged state of shock, and could not possibly figure out how the MSM had gotten it so wrong.  This was its headline this morning:  “How Did the Media . . . . Get This [So] Wrong?”

Scrambling to try to make sense of what happened, this is the kind of questions, analysis and explanations  the Times was coming up with:

“So, what just happened? “We don’t know what happened, because the tools that we would normally use to help us assess what happened failed,” Ms. Haberman says. “The polling on both sides was wrong.”

Mr. Rutenberg had just finished writing about how the media had missed Mr. Trump’s wide appeal, and what that misfire says about journalists’ flawed understanding of major swaths of our country. “What we now know is that a huge part of the country is far more upset about the ills that he was pointing to and promising to fix than any of the flaws that we were pointing out about him as a candidate,” Mr. Rutenberg says on the show.

“I would say this is a failure of expertise on the order of the fall of the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War,” Mr. Confessore says. “What we are seeing is in part a revolt of the country that people had written off as the country of the past, against the country that most people thought they were living in: a country of the future, of a multicultural future, of a globalized world. This was a revolt of people who did not feel vested in that future America.”

What we are seeing is also a repudiation of Mrs. Clinton. “Fundamentally Clinton, as it turns out, was the worst candidate Democrats could have run — which is kind of ironic since the field was cleared for her back in 2013,” Ms. Haberman says. “Had almost any other major Democratic candidate been the nominee, they would have beaten Donald Trump.”

The answer to the NYT’s question is actually much more simple than that:  In a nutshell, the Mainstream Media is completedly blinded by its own biases.  They are so cock-sure of the narrative they have created that they simply don’t see and recognize reality when it’s right in front of them, including the actual level of discontent in this country, particularly with respect to the current political status quo.  That the Mainstream Media is biased is no secret, but the extent to which they are completely blinded by their biases has never been more evident.

In a lot of what I write and talk about when it comes to this sort of thing, I’m often discussing the differences between views on each end of the applicable spectrum.  It is something I addressed repeatedly and at some length with respect to the Oregon Standoff Trial — the so-called “extremes” at both end of the spectrum, with the vast majority (80+%) of people in the middle, who seemingly didn’t really care.

By contrast, however, our very divisive presidential election seems to have covered the entire spectrum.  The level of interest and turn-out for the election was unprecedented in some areas, and near-record-setting in many others.  In other words, this election has been something that the vast majority of Americans are interested in — and turned-out to vote in. Many suffered inconvenience and stood in long lines to do it.  Why?  Because they are concerned about where things stand.  They want change.  And they spoke at the ballot box.

Make no mistake, in contrast to the MSM, public opiion has covered the full spectrum, and so has Alternative Media coverage,  But when it comes to the actual Mainstream Media, there is no “spectrum” per se.  The Mainstream Media is very heavily one-sided.  It is heavily concentrated almost entirely on one side of the equation.  What this means is that the conventional, mainstream “news” we consume is seriously slanted and heavily tainted by Mainstream Media bias.  Just like its reaction to the Oregon Standoff Trial verdict, Mainstream Media’s reaction to Trump’s election is the true epitome of its blinding biases.

Just a short month ago, following the first “October Surprise” — the Donald Trump “sex tape” — followed by the final presidential debate, which was a true circus, the Mainstream Media was ready to call the election in Clinton’s favor.  The MSM was convinced that this was the nail in Donald Trump’s coffin.  With the second October Surprise — a new round of accusations in the never-ending Hillary Clinton email scandal — the Mainstream Media seemed to be truly caught off-guard, and when coupled with the decoding of pedophilia and sex-trafficking accusations against big players in the Clinton campaign itself — that never saw the light of day in Mainstream Media — things really started getting dicey in the presidential race.  But you would have never known that by following the Mainstream Media.  Their message was that although the race had tightened slightly, it was still essentially a foregone conclusion that Clinton would be elected.  At this point, in retrospect, however, it is obvious that the MSM had been out of touch with reality from the outset, and right down to the wire.

Part of my own perceptions about all of this have been shaped by an experiment/study currently being conducted by a major global media outlet that I have been an active participant in.  A month or so ago, they approached me and asked if I would be willing to participate in the study, and if I could help come up with some other “conservative” participants who would be willing to look at and seriously consider the “liberal” social media offerings they put together and talk about to what extent our political views were influenced and shaped by what we were seeing.  I’m not going to go into all the details of that experiment, but it has definitely reinforced my view that we simply don’t get a straight scoop from the Mainstream Media.  It was interesting, however, that while their material certainly reinforced my questions and concerns about Donald Trump, it did absolutely nothing to instill greater confidence in Hillary Clinton, leaving me feeling like America had backed itself into a corner with two very poor choices for president.

But try as the Mainstream Media might to persuade me that Donald Trump was not the answer, it did little to convince me that Hillary Clinton was the answer. Even as I had committed to consume only their coverage and material regarding the election, it became more obvious than ever just how slanted and single-dimensional their coverage is, and how blinded they are by their own biases.

Reaction to the election is only the latest, and perhaps greatest, example of this. What next?

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